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Shakespeare's wisdom avoided the only fate for Ophelia that would have been more plangent than her death-in-water: marriage to Hamlet the Dane.
Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (44)
Speaking of classics, have you ever read "Hamlet"? If you haven't, do it right off. It's perfectly corking.
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At present I'm Ophelia-and such a sensible Ophelia! I keep Hamlet amused all the time, and pet him and scold him and make him wrap up his throat when he has a cold. I've entirely cured him of being melancholy. The King and Queen are both dead-an accident at sea; no funeral necessary-so Hamlet and I are ruling in Denmark without any bother. We have the kingdom working beautifully. He takes care of the governing, and I look after the charities.
Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs ( 62-63; original emphasis )
These epigraphs-the first from self-appointed caretaker of canonicity Harold Bloom, and the second from Jean Webster's 1912 novel-convey some of the tensions that emerge in thinking about Ophelia as a model of or for adolescent femininity, and serve as reminders that the complexities of romance, gender, sexuality, and mortality which haunt Shakespeare's Ophelia also haunt her afterlives. Rather than acceding to or reproducing oppositions between masculine, academic criticism and feminine, imaginative emotion, Lisa Fiedler's Dating Hamlet (2002), Lisa Klein's Ophelia: A Novel (2006), and Michelle Ray's Palling for Hamlet (2011 ) offer adolescent readers an Ophelia who engages critically and creatively with her context, and model a Shakespearean subjectivity which values intellectual and emotional engagement with Hamlet.
Shakespearean young adult literature offers a powerful arena for the negotia- tion of sociocultural norms and individual development, as it makes explicit the socializing and acculturating strategies inherent to children's literature.1 As a play often understood to metonymically represent both Shakespeare's genius and his corpus, The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark (1603/1623) might reasonably be expected to occupy a central position in children's Shake- speare. From the first English-language adaptation of the plays for children, Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Hamlet has rarely been absent from collections of plot-based retellings targeted at preadolescent readers. In turn, as Megan Isaac notes, "Hamlet seems like an especially ripe text for revision by young adult authors; the themes embedded in this...